ah yes but its so much more fun to blame others eh?..great read!
Have a blessed Sunday :)

I have to agree with you Tom. They made a choice not out of desperation, but out of hatred.

I knew one of the guilty men personally. Waheed Mahmood (bottom right corner of image). I got on fairly well with his brother Raheed when we were mid teens. Waheed was always a sullen and spiteful piece of work. He associated with troublemakers while at school, the ones who were doing dope, drinking and getting into fights. He committed assaults and got involved in petty crimes. The local police knew him very well indeed.

Then one day I heard he had 'gone religious'. He went orthodox almost overnight, growing a beard, wearing traditional dress and shunning those white kids he grew up with. He started attending the mosque regularly with a group of other young men and at about the same time Al Muhajiroun stickers appeared on lampposts and talking of going to Pakistan for 'instruction'. Many of them started martial arts and acted like a gang.

Waheed got a job with British Gas and continued with his outwardly pious lifestyle. But the character within him had not changed. It was merely channelled into hating for a reason.

When I heard about the arrests of people from Crawley, his was the first name that popped into my head. So when he was finally named it was no surprise. This is a pattern repeated up and down the country.

Those lads had opportunities. They were treated equally. The white kids and Pakistanis associated in their youth, playing football together and using the same facilities. It was the deliberate radicalisation of handpicked youngsters who thrived on trouble, by people who claimed religion would turn their lives around, that caused this. People who hate this country and the west nurtured the likes of Mahmood to attack it.

It's amazing. If we didn't have society we wouldn't have criminals (/sarc)

Good piece.